"Compacting the Uncompactable" by Bobby Powers

There’s a great paper from the group of Emery Berger, where they merge memory pages that become sparse. A kind of garbage collection for C and C++ languages. There’s also a good presentation about it on youtube. link The presentation: ▶ this video

There was a great talk at Strange Loop about a drop-in malloc replacement which compacts. Apparently it actually led to memory usage improvements in industrial projects like Redis: ▶ this video

> but malloc/free based systems also have a relatively high memory overhead due to fragmentation In case you haven't seen it, there's been some interesting progress on that front: ▶ this video

There's an interesting talk [0] from Bobby Powers on how to make a malloc() and free() that perform compaction, to be able to release memory back to the operating system more frequently (and improve cache hit rates, etc.). But this isn't standard at all yet. [1]: ▶ this video